100 years of Van Doesburg’s ‘Maison d’Artiste’ –

The permanent ‘Mondrian & De Stijl’ exhibit currently includes 10 models based on Theo van Doesburg’s ‘Maison d’Artiste’ model.

A hundred years ago Theo van Doesburg (leading light of De Stijl) and architect Cornelis van Eesteren presented a model of a home for an artist (‘Maison d’Artiste’) at a gallery in Paris. It represents Van Doesburg’s utopian vision of “living in a spatial painting”.

The model consisted of stacked spaces with square and rectangular planes, resembling a Piet Mondrian composition. The design was intended above all as a manifesto against what they regarded as the rigidity of traditional architecture.

But how realistic was Van Doesburg’s experiment? “There has been too little attempt at […] efficiency, practicability”, one journalist wrote. The colours were regarded as alienating. The model was accepted more as a work of art than as architecture. “….but to live in it?”, many wondered.

To this day, the question of the practicality of Maison d’Artiste continues to appeal to the imagination, all the more so because the original model was lost. Students of Mick Eekhout (architect and emeritus professor of architecture) reconstructed the form and the colour scheme in 2002. Twenty years later, in 2022, Eekhout developed the ‘three-dimensional painting’ into a habitable structure.

The models of these reconstructions and further developments based on the original model are now on display at the museum.

To enhance the experience, designer and architect Tim van Beukering and Eekhout made animations of a virtual tour of the building.

Another reconstruction, made by Kunstmuseum Den Haag in 2017, is also on show. It focuses on what the original model would have looked like, using the most original materials possible, rather than on whether it was actually habitable.